Google engineer slams Google+ as 'pathetic afterthought'

More bad news for Google+: first, we discovered that Google’s top management apparently aren’t big users of the company’s social network, then traffic fell and now it appears that at least one of the rank-and-file is pretty critical of the platform as well.

Steve Yegge, a Google engineer, intended his 5000-word post to be an internal diatribe for other Google employees, but accidentally published it for his 2000 or so followers. The rant, posted in its entirety here, at first focuses on Yegge’s former employer, Amazon, which he calls to task for its inconsistent hiring practices and CEO Jeff Bezos, who is presented as an obsessive micromanager.

Then Yegge switches gears to talk about Google. "That one last thing that Google doesn’t do well is platforms. We don’t understand platforms. We don’t ‘get’ platforms,” Yegge wrote. “Google+ is a prime example of our complete failure to understand platforms from the very highest levels of executive leadership (hi Larry, Sergey, Eric, Vic, howdy howdy) down to the very lowest leaf workers (hey yo).” The G+ platform, Yegge wrote, is a “pathetic afterthought” and Google lacked an application programming interface (API) at launch, which allows other web apps to interact with yours.

Google’s biggest blunder, he added, is that it didn’t emulate Facebook’s plan of building “an entire constellation of products by allowing other people to do the work.”

Yegge went on to write, “Our Google+ team took a look at the aftermarket and said: ‘Gosh, it looks like we need some games. Let’s go contract someone to, um, write some games for us.’ Do you begin to see how incredibly wrong that thinking is now? The problem is that we are trying to predict what people want and deliver it for them.”

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Yegge’s most recent post is an apology for the rant: “Sadly, it was intended to be an internal post, visible to everybody at Google, but not externally. But as it was midnight and I am not what you might call an experienced Google+ user.”